`Help! I'm Being Attacked By People With Coins!'

OTHER NEWS TO NOTE - The World

July 4, 1999

SYDNEY, Australia - A bizarre computer glitch has left soft-drink machines calling for help - literally. The faulty machines may have placed hundreds of phone calls to police, ambulance and fire-service emergency phone lines, blocking true emergency calls, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday. Thousands of the machines around Sydney are programmed to call a number at a distribution company when they are near empty. However, some of the machines dialed a default 000 number, the emergency number, instead of the distribution company number, the newspaper reported.